Panel Sticks by Guns, Wants F Grade Erased : Education: Community task force doesn’t buckle in push to give failing students a no credit and a chance to repeat course.

A special community task force on dropout prevention held to its guns Tuesday and defended its recommendation to eliminate F grades in San Diego city secondary schools, despite a rising chorus of concern and opposition among teachers and principals.

The replacement of Fs with a no credit, allowing students to repeat the course, is an idea based on the philosophy that schools should expect all students to succeed rather than anticipate that many will fail, Irma Castro, task force chairwoman, told trustees.

The policy, approved last month by the board as part of a new promotion-retention policy, has been criticized for having the potential of lowering academic standards and discipline, for sending a message to students that they are not responsible for the consequences of their actions, and for misunderstanding how to improve a student’s self-esteem.

Board president Shirley Weber, concerned about the tone of the public debate, had asked the task force to come back with possible alterations to the policy, which is meant to show a “more positive” attitude toward students having difficulty in schools by telling them that an initial poor academic effort will not be held against them if they try harder a second time.

But the task force held its ground Tuesday, although trustees indicated that they might want to make some changes themselves in two weeks when they vote on revisions.

The task force has become “the conscience of the district,” Castro told board members, and the idea of no Fs is based on the idea that success should be rewarded and failure not punished--or as Castro put it, “the potential for non-prejudice (instead of) punishment as an incentive for success.”

School district Supt. Tom Payzant himself has compared school grading to the taking of a driver’s license test, where an applicant can take the test over and over--without any permanent record of having failed--until successful in passing the exam.

Castro, supported by Roosevelt Junior High Principal Norman Kellner, denied that the policy will foster so-called social promotion, where students are moved from grade to grade whether they have learned material or not. Castro said that district graduation standards, which require 44 credits in math, English, science, social studies and other courses between grades 9 and 12, remain the same, and that a student must complete a course with a D or better to earn a credit.

The only difference is that failure to gain a credit in a particular course will not be recorded as an F, which recognizes “that students may progress at different rates.”

Castro said, “The policy says that students will be promoted only in areas where they meet standards, and schools will seek new solutions to support students in areas where they have not met standards.”

The task force recommends that the no credit be treated as an F for grade point averaging until a student repeats a course satisfactorily and eliminates the no credit. It also said that only students with a D or no credit be allowed to repeat a course.

Trustees raised several questions about the policy that they will wrestle with during the next two weeks.

John de Beck said he would favor continuing to give a student an F but eliminating it if and when the student repeats the course successfully. De Beck also said the policy fails to address the real issue of how to motivate those at-risk students who are the main target of the pending policy, and to show them they must take responsibility for their education.

De Beck, a former San Diego city schools teacher who taught at-risk students for more than 30 years, bristled at the idea that the schools alone are at fault for a student not succeeding.

Susan Davis asked whether the policy could make a distinction between those students who genuinely try to succeed in a class but fail to master the material and those students who do not attend or fail to even attempt the curriculum.

But Kellner, backed by trustee Ann Armstrong, said there is no need to ask why a student didn’t achieve a credit. “We should focus on ways to get the student a credit,” Kellner said.

Trustee Sue Braun suggested that the board hear from teachers when it meets again in two weeks because they are the ones who will have to carry out any new grade policy.